New xvidcore package at mentors.debian.net

[Fabian Greffrath]

Hi Loic and Reinhard,

Reinhard Tartler schrieb:
> no, that seems pretty excessive to me. Are you sure that upstream is
> breaking ABI all the time?

According to the xvid homepage the API remained backwards compatible 
at least until the 1.1.3 release which was two years ago.

> Fabian has some comments on the package, espc. on debian/copyright I
> think moving the package to cdbs. perhaps you two can  discuss that on
> the mailing list?

Yes, let's just start here. The two files that caused headache for me 
were debian/rules and debian/copyright.

debian/rules:
I think the file is absolutely overloaded and contains tons of 
redundant stuff - especially since xvid is nothing more than another 
autotool'ed source. The get-orig-source rule is redundant IMHO since 
the only change we do to the source code is removing the upstream 
debian/ directory - which is trivial and already documented in the 
changelog.
I have converted the file to use CDBS and now it has 6 lines of code 
while retaining all the basic funtionality. I refrained from adding 
the whole battery of optimization specific CFLAGS, because (a) if they 
are suitable for the targeted combination of code/OS/compiler/arch 
then upstream should set them and (b) if they are not, we shouldn't 
set them eiher. I don't consider it distributor's tasks to finetune 
the last performance bits out of source code that is supposed to 
remain portable.

debian/copyright:
I like the idea of a machine parsable copyright file but I don't think 
that a 20kB file repeating the very same information over and over 
again brings us anywhere. The most important part is the everything is 
licensed under the GPL-2+ and that all copyright holders find their 
name in the file. Everything else is just added confusion IMHO. I have 
changed the file to list all upstream copyright holders for "Files: *" 
and "License: GPL-2+". I am sorry this would shoot down all the 
investigation that you have done on the code, but I really think that 
we should find a reasonable common denominator in this regard.

For the two "special files" src/dct/{fdct.c,idct.c} I found another 
issue. You include some text from the README file in the license 
notice. IMHO this is irrelevant. Instead there is another copyright 
notice (MPEG group) and license fragment in the file that you might 
have overlooked. I added this to the license text for these two files.


All the other files in the Debian packaging looked rather OK to me, 
maybe expect some cosmetic thinks like the -dev package bearing the 
soname in its package name.

My current proposal can be found here:
http://debian.greffrath.com/unstable/xvidcore_1.2.2%2bdebian-0fab4.dsc

Please review my packaging and tell me your opinion before I check in 
my changes into our GIT repository.

Cheers,
Fabian